I have a bigass spreadsheet I use to track every last dollar, and I ruthlessly optimize everything.
Cell phone plan, down to $30/month. Health insurance, just $300/month. No tv. No subscriptions. No commute. Even if I did, I own my car outright so no car payment. No B.S. pre-packaged food. I cook pretty much everything at home. Have done so for years. Minimal eating out, once a month or so at inexpensive restaurants. No debt. Of any kind. So therefore no interest payments.
A few small "luxury" expenses here like a ski pass because you only live once.
All of this is completely within the realm of someone who makes $70k per year or more, the bottom rung of software development.
You should be able to hit $100K in savings in five years if you are smart with your money. Likely more if you really hustle and audit every dollar. Maybe a little less if you're supporting kids, but you can optimize how you spend your money on them too.
Hope you don't fall off the treadmill, because if you do, you'll find out there is no way back and no pity.
On top of that, I was super stubborn about always working remotely, which I got but only after rejecting one place after another. I would have kept employment easily had I just been more willing to drive into an office every day.
I happen to be young, but I work with plenty of people who are much older than me and greyer too, so I don't really buy the ageism argument. The market is hot and if you can deliver the goods, chances are you can get a job.
Demonstrating what you can do at a temporary job is a viable tactic, but it takes luck to find the right one and sacrifices if it's paying half what you're used to.
When you're just out of college, you can tell people in an interview that you've been learning a language on your own, and you've done this and that, and you're confident you can be useful. And they will hire you. That's how I got my first post bachelor's job.
But ten or twenty years down the line, you can't do that. Any job with 5-10 requirements, they aren't interested in hearing how you have been studying it at home, how you were working with something similar 6 months or 10 years ago. You have to be using all of the things on a daily basis now. And confidence you can learn any language equates to arrogance and "not a cultural fit".
You don't appreciate the difference between a college grad and someone a bit older. The issue isn't that everyone who's older insists on a senior level salary, when they don't know, say, Java or Python. The issue is that it's assumed they can't even learn anything new, regardless of experience, if they aren't doing it right now.
What I did personally was to find a job with zero technical requirements that happened to be ripe for automation, so I could do whatever I wanted in any spare moment and learn whatever I thought might be useful. But in retrospect, I think it was extreme luck that I found it, and that I was at my best for the interview. Because 99% of similar jobs are just, file stuff, answer phones, move boxes.
I won't say how much I have in savings, but your 100k in five years (20k saved a year?! SERIOUSLY?! that's more than min wage full time job, PRE TAX!) is not at ALL realistic. No I don't work a Min Wage job, but I'm not SF/Bay/SV area salary wither.
I have an emergency fund of roughly 3-6 months of necessary bills. It's not really enough to say "FU", but it's enough to give me an emotional buffer of, "I could leave if things got bad enough"
How many times have you quit without plans and gotten right back to work?
Try moving to seattle or if rain doesn't work for you, the bay area. With an income of $300k+ you could probably save that $100k amount in a few years. Don't move until you have job, that way you get a relocation benefit and that $3000/month rent won't seem that crazy to you.
Even working at a startup will pay you better than what I'm estimating you make in austin.
There's much more to my life than being a programmer, that's just what I do for work. My life does not revolve around it.